I hope you have a great holiday. I’m kind of burned out on cooking on Thanksgiving, so I’m outta here. We’re heading for the hills to some hot springs for the next few days. I don’t even really give a dadgummit if Thursday’s dinner is steam tray turkey and Stove Top stuffing–so long as I don’t have to cook it, it’s all good. That’s something I can be very thankful for. (H/t to Notorious Ph.D. for the awesome visual aid at left!!!)

And since you’ve asked: yes, indeed, our mountains look just like that.

Those of you who are cooking (poor dears!) may need a little inspiration, so here’s a roundup of my impressive Thanksgiving-themed blogging from the previous three years. Enjoy!

11 Responses to “Holiday round-up: Happy Cranksgiving!”

Have a great holiday, cowgirl. Hope you get to sip on a pisco sour or four in them there hot springs. Take a soak for us, will ya? Moose is cooking, so the fantasy of a long hot bath has appeal.

And thank you for that awesome image of Fraulein Maria, which we will be pleased to steal and re-purpose on some slow day in the blogosphere when only a singing nun with the vocabulary of a sailor will do.

I only reluctantly accepted an invitation to dine with a colleague and neighbor, and only because 1) I think she doesn’t want to be alone; and 2) it gives me an excuse to try out a recipe for pumpkin cobbler.

(I know this is off-topic, but…. The first time I saw the singing-nun/sailor-vocab picture I was puzzled. I’m so old school, I read it literally and couldn’t understand why she’d be so pleased about not having sex. After about five minutes, it dawned on me, “Oh, wait….”)

I think I’ll just memorize all these recipes and attendent anecdota and not eat anything at all tomorrow, as a) a way of losing weight, b) a sort of zen kind of gesture b) a cost-containment vehicle d) a way of not cooking e) a time-shift to the hot tub f) all of above.

Anyway, have a great adventure and safe driving. Next year I think I’ll hijack a Soyuz capsule and land via parachute in one of those mountain valleys out there! (….Over River, Over Woods, All Clear, Touchdown!!)

quixote: that’s a pretty hilarious misunderstanding!!! I spent my brief time away from home immersed in 19th C American anti-Catholic agitprop, like Six Months in a Convent and Maria Monk’s fake “memiors.” So I understand entirely where you were coming from!

I hope you all had a restful and enjoyable holiday. Regular blogging should resume this weekend, including an update with new contributions on the “what’s wrong with higher ed?” meme.

I had plenty of depressing conversations with my critical care friend about what’s wrong with medical education (not med school so much as graduate medical education–residencies and fellowships). There are similar parallels to many of the issues we’ve been discussing here: the mania for de-skilling certain fields, for example, but also the desire to somehow extract more value from an education into which one is pouring fewer resources (time, money, faculty labor, actual F2F hands-on teaching, etc.)

I get the feeling more & more that large concentrations of capital like corporations, universities, and hospitals are using the ongoing economic crisis as an excuse to squeeze labor, no matter how highly skilled or trained, and at the same time to offer less to patrons/students/patients. But I can’t figure out if the administrators enacting these schemes think that they see the party coming to an end & are attempting merely to feather their own nests, or if they think they’ve truly dreamed up a new managerial paradigm.

Glad you’re back, Historiann! I was reading something very recently about some “innovation” in medical training that struck me as very convergent with some of the conversations that have happened here and made a mental note to pass it along, which became a deleted mental note, and now I can’t recover it. I can still see the picture that illustrated the story. Will keep trying.